New (to me) Meeting Transcript Artifacts

An accidental discovery during recent Copilot meeting testing

Photo by Ferenc Almasi on Unsplash

Before we get started, a shout-out to the forensic experts I had the opportunity to speak with in Orlando last week. I wrote about the experience in the Thought-Provoking Things newsletter on Friday, so that I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say, the challenge of collecting data from M365 was on full display, and the audience engagement and feedback were fantastic.

I briefly mentioned last week, during my discussion of using the Facilitator agent in meetings, that I found something interesting in my mailbox about transcripts. This week, I want to share more details of what I saw.

As described, my testing involved using the agent in a meeting and then collecting everything from that specific day, allowing for the possibility that Copilot could create artifacts anywhere. This is a one-account tenant, so I can still search across the entire thing without making a huge collection, so I’m taking advantage of that while I can.

My query identified 129 items, 88 of which came from my mailbox. That last number seemed high for a mailbox that hosted one meeting with an agent and had received just 3-5 emails.

Once collected into the review set, it became apparent that many of those items were HTML files stored in Exchange Online. What were they, though?

It turns out they were transcript snippets. Here is an example of the content of one such HTML file:

Screenshot of the HTML file

It’s a list of properties with values for the meeting and conversation IDs, speaker, body (snippet text), start and end times, etc. In effect, the Exchange Online mailbox now stores multiple HTML files that comprise the entire transcript of the meeting I hosted.

This seems simple enough, but it does pose some eDiscovery challenges because the HTML file lacks context. If an attorney comes across this during document review, what are they to make of it? How would they know where it came from?

There are a couple of other questions it raises for me: